Abstract

To the Editors: I am writing to offer a correction to a statement made by Drs. Suzanne and Robert Fletcher in a recent issue (1). In the third paragraph, where the Editors discuss the "track record" of prepublication releases, they refer to the first clinical alert issued by the National Cancer Institute, saying that it urged adjuvant therapy for patients with nodenegative breast cancer. They further comment that a subsequent consensus development conference in 1990 issued quite a different recommendation: more research. Although this is a common misconception of the purpose of the original clinical alert, it was, in fact,